Saturday, February 12, 2011

Smoked Trout and Green Flageolet Bean Salad

Dill may be quite a delicate looking herb, with those wispy,willowy fronds but it does have a most distinctive yet delightful scent. It particularly seems to have found its perfect match with seafood and the dish I've made sees this relationship continue.

While flicking through Issue 1 of Dish Magazine, I spotted a recipe for a White Bean and Smoked Fish Salad - what interested me most was the dressing, made with soft boiled egg, dill and parsley amongst other ingredients. I have played around with the recipe a little - simplifying the dressing and using Green Flageolet Beans and Smoked Trout.

Make the dressing:
Place the soft boiled egg, parsley, dill, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of olive oil into a processor and process until roughly chopped. Add another drizzle of oil and pulse until finely chopped - taste and adjust for seasoning, adding more lemon juice and/or oil as necessary. The consistency you're after is like a slackened mayonnaise.

Assemble the salad
I've used canned green flageolet but you could also use haricot or cannellini beans - either dried or canned it is up to you.
If you're using canned beans, make sure you rinse them first.

Place the drained beans into a bowl and tip in half the dressing - toss well to mix it through. Add in the finely sliced onion along with a little more of the dressing and give it a brief toss. Take the fillet and roughly flake it over the beans - gently tumble the trout through the bean mixture adding more dressing if desired.

If you're serving this as a salad, then you would tumble this mixture onto a bed of watercress or baby spinach leaves (or a combination of the two).

I've gone even simpler than that - serving it as is, with slices of toasted olive bread - it's more like a bruschetta topping than salad.

What a nice recipe, Haalo! I am bookmarking it and will revisit it when I have fresh dill. I love growing it and it does well in our cool climate. It grows quite tall and it puts out pretty yellow heads of tiny flowers. I like trout a lot but I have never tasted smoked trout: I will try. Beautiful photos, as always.

Thanks Mimi & Katie - smoked trout is great, I really should use it more often

Thanks Marisa!

Thanks Janet - there should be more smoked trout!

Hope you do Lisa!

Thanks Lynne - always happy to have you host again!

Thanks Simona - they use rainbow trout to make smoked trout and it is wonderfully moist and full of flavour, delicious!

Hi Anon - in the past I've bought dried white flageolet beans from Essential Ingredient (Melbourne) and they now stock dried green flageolet but they are on the pricey side. For this recipe I've found canned green flageolet at an independent supermarket and they are really good and very reasonably priced.